Nine Lives summary

In the mid-1990s, an intense yet intelligent Bahraini youth was convinced that he wanted to defend his Muslim faith – so he set off for war. He was only 16 years old. But years later, after having sworn loyalty to Osama bin Laden, he found he no longer believed in the jihadi cause. He’d come to the conclusion that al-Qaeda was using badly-informed interpretations of the Koran to justify its acts of terror, something he could no longer support.

So he decided to switch sides.

These blinks trace the remarkable life story of Ali al-Durrani – now known as Aimen Dean – from his early life as a jihadi to his years working for the British intelligence agency MI6. Moving from the Gulf to the Philippines to the British town of Dudley, Dean’s story is packed with drama and intrigue, and offers a unique perspective into the murky world of Islamist extremism.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• what a one-on-one meeting with Osama bin Laden is like;
• why 9/11 took everyone by surprise; and
• why you shouldn’t watch The Smurfs.

The Bosnian conflict was ending, and the jihadis began to look elsewhere. The next stop, it seemed, was the Caucasus – specifically the Russian region of Chechnya, where Muslims were being persecuted by the Russian military, and extremists were rushing to their defense.

Ali made his way to the nearby city of Baku, capital of neighboring Azerbaijan. But this time he didn’t get as far as the front line: he found work in Baku for a charity that was funding the Chechen resistance, and even acquired some useful accountancy skills.

But the work wasn’t scratching Ali’s itch to fight. Realizing he needed further training, he set off once again – this time for Darunta, which he was assured was Afghanistan’s very best jihadi camp. He never did make it to Chechnya – his next assignment ended up being much further afield.

The key message here is: Ali worked for the jihadi cause in Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, but martyrdom remained elusive.

Ali went to Darunta in 1996, at a key moment in the jihadi movement. By chance, he arrived there at the same time as al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden – “the Sheikh,” as he was known. Bin Laden was just beginning to see the need to take the jihadi fight outside the Arab world and focus on other targets – specifically the United States. But an attack there was still some way off.

Life in the Darunta camp was hard, especially for Ali. He shone intellectually, and found that many of his fellow jihadis had very little knowledge of the Koran. On the flip side, Ali found it hard to keep up when it came to physical exercise. He also fell ill with malaria, and even suffered a scorpion sting.

Ali eventually gained the combat skills needed to be assigned to the Philippines, where the Moro Islamic Liberation Front was fighting the national army. Reunited with his friend Khalid, he made the trip in late 1996. They were momentarily alarmed when an air marshal approached them on the plane. But he turned out to be on their side – in fact, they’d fought with his cousin in Bosnia. He upgraded them to first class.

The conflict in the Philippines was not what Ali had hoped for. The jungle, with its spiders and snakes, proved as dangerous as the enemy. And in one of his few combat encounters, Ali was hit in the leg by some shrapnel, causing searing pain.

After his recovery, Ali’s disillusion with the conflict in the Philippines reached its peak. He decided to return to al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan base of operations.

It was in September 1997 when Ali was invited to come to Kandahar. The occasion? To make the pledge that all aspiring jihadis longed to make.

In Kandahar, Ali was ushered into a private audience with Osama bin Laden. A remarkably tall man with a hawk-like expression, he calmly said that Ali had been chosen by God. Looking straight into his eyes, Ali solemnly swore allegiance to the Sheikh.

Bin Laden then revealed al-Qaeda’s new battle plan to Ali. The enemy, he said, had now become America. It was all part of al-Qaeda’s effort to accelerate the arrival of the final phase of history, as foretold by the Prophet Muhammad. Al-Qaeda would soon announce its targeting of the USA to the wider world.

Ali returned to Darunta with enthusiasm. But at the same time, he started to develop doubts about certain elements of al-Qaeda’s battle plans.

The key message here is: Ali pledged himself to al-Qaeda, but he doubted some aspects of their mission.

Looking back, Ali regrets the ease with which he took to his work. He was developing weapons with the notorious bomb-maker Abu Khabab, and the scientific aspect to it appealed to Ali’s intelligence. He knew, on some level, that he was creating weapons designed for use on civilians, but he pushed that thought aside.

With Abu Khabab, he worked not just on bombs but on chemical weapons too. They used all manner of toxins, even nicotine. Extracting it from huge quantities of cigarettes, they developed an elaborate poison. Although Ali excelled at the work, experimenting relentlessly on rabbits would go on to haunt his dreams for years to come.

Serious illness – both malaria and typhoid – put him out of action for some time. During his recovery, he was tasked with educating fighters in religion. In doing so, he often encountered young men who had little knowledge – or interest – in the religion of Islam. Many had no idea about the religious basis of their fight, and some were clearly driven by bloodlust.

Within al-Qaeda, though, Ali’s star was rising. He was chosen for a mission to the UK. His innocent appearance made him ideal for smuggling a satellite phone, loaded with £25,000 of calling credit. Ali found himself rather enjoying his brief trip to London.

Upon his return to Afghanistan, there was a new strategy under discussion that made him feel uneasy – suicide attacks. Ali believed that such attacks were prohibited by the Koran, but others disagreed. If this was the direction in which the jihadi cause was heading, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of it.

In August 1998, al-Qaeda’s first suicide attack took place: a double bombing at the US embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The blasts killed 224 people, and only 12 were the Americans who were supposed to be the targets.

Progress on Abu Khabab’s chemical weapons was going well, too. Ali had been helping on a deadly poison gas weapon that came to be known as the mubtakkar. But in the wake of the Kenya attack, he was coming to a hard realization – if murdering innocents was the direction al-Qaeda was heading, he didn’t want to be involved anymore.

During the previous year, his bout of poor health had taken him to Qatar for treatment. So he cautiously retrieved his passport from his al-Qaeda superiors and flew into Doha airport.

As luck would have it, Qatari state security soon came calling. Ali felt nervous at first, but also relieved. Still aged just 20, he believed this was his chance to turn his life around and leave terrorism behind.

The key message here is: Having lost faith in al-Qaeda, Ali decided to turn informant.

Ali still believed powerfully in the Muslim faith, and that Muslims around the world needed defending. But he’d realized that much of al-Qaeda’s work was built on shaky or misleading interpretations of scripture as a pretext for appalling violence.

The leaders picked and chose passages that conformed to their violent whims, resulting in bogus justifications for suicide attacks and civilian casualties. Was al-Qaeda really acting in the best interests of the world’s entire Muslim population? Ali was now sure it was doing the opposite.

Which is why, when the time came for his interview with the interrogators in Qatar, they were rather taken aback to find Ali voluntarily sharing highly-sensitive information. He even gave them a senior al-Qaeda member’s bank account number, which he’d remembered thanks to his photographic memory. His interrogators could barely conceal their joy.

There was a limited amount he could do for a small country’s intelligence operation, though. Soon it was time for the Qataris to send him the way of one of the major powers – France, the US, or the UK.

Ali was cautioned away from the Americans, who didn’t have a good track record of looking after their sources, and he had little knowledge of French language or culture. Plus, he’d enjoyed his brief visit to London. So he chose the UK.

He flew into London Heathrow airport one dark December afternoon and shook hands with two men who introduced themselves as Tom and Harry. They went straight into an interview room.

Another British intelligence officer who went by the name of Richard, was so struck by Ali’s tales that he gave him a nickname: the cat. He was rattling through his nine lives, Richard quipped.

Over the course of a few months, Ali poured information out to the agents, startled by how little they knew. Only since the recent Kenya bombings had Islamist terrorism really starting appearing on the agenda.

With his brilliant memory and extensive network, Ali was the ideal informant. His information frequently ended up in both 10 Downing Street and the White House. Eventually, however, MI6 would need even more from him.

The key message here is: Ali worked hard for British intelligence, first in the UK and then back in Afghanistan.

Ali told his al-Qaeda contacts that he’d come to the UK for medical reasons. They were understanding, and asked him to assist with recruitment while he was there. He obliged, feeding valuable information back to his handlers.

He came to understand why so many second-generation British Muslims were being driven toward al-Qaeda. Though born there, few of them felt truly British and constantly experienced racism. Their disillusionment played into the hands of radical London preachers like Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza.

Ali also discovered something about his family history: his father had had a British passport – had he perhaps been a spy as well? Ali couldn’t be sure – but now he could apply for a passport too. Both MI6 and al-Qaeda liked that idea, as it allowed him to travel internationally with ease.

Eventually, his handlers asked Ali to return to Afghanistan, undercover. Ali had originally hoped to leave this world behind him, and maybe become a teacher. But he was flattered and decided to accept the task.

He hit upon the idea of starting a business exporting food from Kashmir. Al-Qaeda liked any idea that had the potential to provide income, and it would give him sufficient cover for plenty of time away from the jihadi camps.

Once he was back in Darunta, Ali barely had time to register Abu Khabab’s alarming progress on bomb-making before he was called up to the front line. And this time, no longer desperate for martyrdom, he felt afraid. And with good reason.

Sitting in the back of a pickup truck, Ali was exposed to enemy fire. He turned around and saw that a round of bullets had gone straight through the head of the fighter sitting next to him.

The cat had lost his fifth life.

In September 1999, a series of bomb attacks rocked Moscow resulting in many civilian deaths. Vladimir Putin, recently elected prime minister and already running for president, was widely praised for his handling of the incident. But intelligence services were awhirl with rumors.

It was widely speculated that the bombings were an inside job – that the Russian government had set them up so that they could blame separatist rebels from Muslim Chechnya. Putin did indeed blame the Chechens and swiftly embarked on a ruthless attack against the region.

Even Ali’s handlers at MI6 believed that Putin was behind the Moscow bombings. But Ali was told by Abu Qatada that it was, in fact, a revenge attack by Islamist terrorists.

Abu Qatada himself was worried about this because of the furious and deadly backlash it unleashed against Muslims in Chechnya. This backlash fueled calls for revenge by jihadists – and led to the movement becoming even more radical than before.

The key message here is: At the turn of the millennium, Islamist terrorism was developing rapidly, and Ali had a front-row seat.

Back in Darunta, Ali encountered one especially alarming new figure. MI6 had told him to keep an eye out for ex-prisoners from Jordan, and he met one in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Poorly educated but ruthlessly determined, Zarqawi was keen to learn all he could from Abu Khabab about bomb-making.

Ali had gained a reputation for being able to interpret dreams, and one day Zarqawi asked him to consider one of his. Ali’s interpretation was that two jihadists at Darunta would soon die – and by chance, they did so a few days later in a botched bomb-making experiment. Zarqawi was stunned and his conviction was strengthened. He’d go on to lead al-Qaeda’s operation in Iraq, and lay the foundations for what would later become ISIS.

Ali wanted to meet his handlers as soon as possible to inform them about Zarqawi – and also to update them on the mubtakkar poison gas weapon, which was being readied for use. But he was waylaid when traveling through Pakistan – he forgot to remove his glasses at the border, which made him look suspicious, and he ended up spending several torrid days inside a cell before his British passport got him out.

On reaching London after that, his MI6 handler Richard gave him some time off. Years of exhausting and psychologically draining work, both for and against al-Qaeda, were finally beginning to catch up with Ali.

By June 2001, Ali was back in Afghanistan, but his superiors in al-Qaeda knew that he had another visit to the UK lined up. One day, the senior figure Abu Hafs al-Masri called him in for a brief but vital conversation.

Ali’s task was to tell four al-Qaeda members in the UK that they were to leave that summer – before, as al-Masri put it, “something big” that al-Qaeda had in store. Ali, meanwhile, was to stay stationed in the UK. Al-Masri was expecting that this big development would draw the US straight to Afghanistan. He wasn’t wrong.

Ali’s MI6 connections were as dumbfounded as Ali himself. They didn’t find out the truth until September 11th. Ali was walking down Oxford Street and joined a crowd that had stopped to gaze in horror at a TV screen in a shop window.

The key message here is: The 9/11 attacks caught Ali by surprise and brought home the urgency of his work.

9/11 had been masterminded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and even al-Qaeda members had only been informed on a need-to-know basis. To Ali’s frustration, it had been brilliantly concealed.

After a few months of panicked response, it became apparent that Ali could get more intelligence work done if he was based in the Gulf. So he moved to Bahrain.

There, Ali learned about some of al-Qaeda’s new plans – especially those involving the mubtakkar, which he’d helped develop much earlier. A new associate called Kamal invited him to lead a project developing the mubtakkar for use on military personnel.

Ali played along, feeding all the information back to MI6. But when the Americans heard about this new project, it caused a panicked reaction. Bahraini security forces swiftly moved in and made arrests – even though, because Ali was in charge, there was no risk of the plot going ahead.

Ali was furious – not least because he hadn’t yet been able to locate the 55 kilograms of cyanide that Kamal had just procured. For all he knows, it’s still out there somewhere.

Ali’s arrest was dramatic for another reason. While he was in prison he became very ill. He came to in hospital and the doctors informed him that he was diabetic – he’d had no idea at all.

He was relieved to take some time off in Oxford, where MI6 had found him a peaceful apartment. But the peace proved short-lived.

Much to Ali’s annoyance, in 2004 his work took him to the small British town of Dudley, where a jihadist known as Abu Muslim was determined to develop a deadly poison.

Ali played along but was irritated with the assignment. Weren’t his handlers watching the news, he asked himself? The US invasion of Iraq was going disastrously wrong, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was causing havoc there too – this sort of work hardly seemed a priority.

In fact, Ali wanted a way out altogether. His dreams of becoming a teacher remained strong. But he remembered a line from the Koran: “Whoever saves one life – it is as if he saved mankind entirely.”

So he persevered – for as long as he could.

The key message here is: Despite feeling jaded, Ali continued his intelligence work – until an unexpected event forced his hand.

Ali did not like working with the coarsely spoken Abu Muslim, whose goal was to make a nicotine poison similar to the one Ali had developed in Darunta many years before. His bizarre idea was to smear it onto expensive cars so that the drivers would die, causing a drop in car prices and a rise in insurance.

Abu Muslim was arrested for unrelated financial crimes to keep Ali’s cover safe. However, he was soon out again and fled the country – probably to Pakistan. Another failing, Ali thought, of the intelligence services.

The services also failed to prevent a major attack – the London Underground bombing of July 7, 2005. After a period of chaos, al-Qaeda was finding its feet again, spurred on when it formally joined forces with the psychotic Zarqawi in Iraq. Thankfully, Zarqawi was eventually killed in an airstrike in June 2006.

This was a relief to everyone in intelligence, and Ali was even allowed to take a holiday. He was idling on a boat in Paris when a text came through from a Bahraini friend warning him to take cover. It had just been reported that there was a spy within al-Qaeda – and the spy’s name was Ali.

The report stemmed from an article that had been published by Time magazine, trailing a new book: The One Percent Doctrine by journalist Ron Suskind. It contained all manner of classified details credited to a certain “Ali, a management-level al-Qaeda operative.”

There was little doubt it was him, and it was only a matter of time before al-Qaeda would figure it out as well. That meant one thing for sure: his career as an intelligence officer was over. He returned to London and bade his colleagues an emotional farewell.

He also needed a new name. He went for the neutral-sounding Aimen Dean. A new identity beckoned, and a new life.

By 2013, Aimen had managed to keep his head down for years, but the arrival of some troubling news inspired him to take a huge risk.

His nephew, Ibrahim, had traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State and had been killed at the age of just 19.

Aimen felt not only deep sadness but also a sense of guilt – years before, his teenage nephew had begged him to tell stories about his time in Afghanistan. It had been obvious that Ibrahim was inspired by his uncle’s jihadism, and that this contributed to his later decision to join ISIS.

Aimen was so distraught by his nephew’s death that he decided to throw caution to the wind and resolved to visit his grave in Syria. His journey there was a reminder for him of the horrors of combat, but it also showed him how different things were on that particular front line.

The key message here is: After Aimen’s retirement, the Islamist conflict moved in some horrifying new directions.

Aimen had learned in late 2008 – some two years after he was exposed – that there was a fatwa against him. Jihadis were under orders to kill him if they saw him – although, as he noted with wry relief, they were not under orders to seek him out.

He did once run into a former acquaintance on the London Underground, who pursued him through a busy station with murder in his eyes. But he managed to make his escape.

Years later, when the news came about his nephew, he was in no doubt about making the risky trip to Syria. He contacted a people-smuggler and arranged the journey.

Of course, even for someone without a fatwa, it was hugely dangerous to travel through Syria at that time, given the presence of ISIS. But there were other threats too, and in fact, it was Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government that left an indelible mark on Aimen during his trip. Syrian bombs wreaked devastation unlike anything even battle-scarred Aimen had seen. He sympathized deeply with the local population and their wish for international support.

Aimen eventually made it to Ibrahim’s grave, recently dug and topped up with concrete. He felt overwhelmed by the futility of this death, as of so many others.

Ibrahim’s father, Moheddin, had told Aimen of his son’s death with a certain pride – he was, after all, a martyr. But Aimen saw only the futility of a wasted life. He said a prayer and walked away.